Cell Towers Education

LITCHFIELD — A one-day telecommunications conference, called “Cell Towers Forum, State of the Science State of the Law,” will be held on Saturday, December 2, from 8:45 am to 4:30 pm, at the Education Connection in Litchfield. Its purpose is to help citizens, local governments, planners and zoners, and municipal attorneys better understand the complex issues of telecommunications technologies.

A panel of scientists, government officials, engineers, and attorneys has been organized by the Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council (BLEC), the lead sponsor, in response to the numerous applications to site towers and antenna arrays over the last several years.

“The initial buildout of this technology occurred in the metropolitan areas and along highway corridors,” said BLEC President Starling Childs, who is also on the faculty of the Yale Forestry School. “Now rural areas are seeing a flood of applications, often from companies that are in the vertical real estate business, not the providers of the services,” he added.

“Local zoning boards are often hard pressed to know what to do, and citizens have many legitimate questions about the safety of the technology. We at BLEC thought it was time to bring in a higher level of expertise to help the towns. It’s more complicated than just hiding antennas in church steeples.”

BLEC sponsored a similar conference in 1996 after which many towns subsequently adopted stricter zoning regulations than what telecom providers were suggesting. “That first conference had far-reaching effects which served as a model for areas far beyond Litchfield County,” Mr Childs said. “But since this is a fast-changing realm of the science and the law, and since most decisions come from the Federal level, we figured it was time to hear from those sectors. The kind of expertise we’ve assembled is almost never available at the local level.”

Confirmed speakers include Dr Carl Blackman, senior scientist in bioelectromagnetics at the US Environmental Protection Agency; Dr Albert Manville, a wildlife biologist specializing in bird kills and tower heights at the US Fish and Wildlife Service; Dr Henry Lai, senior scientist at the University of Washington’s Department of Bioengineering in Seattle, the country’s oldest bioelectromagnetics research laboratory; Dr Andrew Marino, an attorney and professor of bioelectromagnetics at Louisiana State University School of Medicine and at the Department of Bioengineering at Louisiana Tech University; and Dr William Curry, retired research physicist at Argonne National Research Laboratories and current consultant at EMSciTek.

Also confirmed on the legal/legislative panel are Whitney North Seymour, Jr, of Landy & Seymour in New York City. A former US district attorney for New York and founder of the National Resources Defense Council, Mr Seymour recently filed a petition at the US Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the Telecommunications Act.

Attorney James Hobson, a telecommunications specialist at Miller & Van Eaton in Washington, DC, and a former FCC official, will also speak, as well as Edward Barron, deputy chief counsel for US senator Patrick Leahy ( D-VT), who has helped write legislation to reverse the Telecom Act and fund research.

Other speakers include Joel Rinebold, executive director of the Connecticut Siting Council; Jeff Anzevino, regional planner for scenic Hudson, Inc., an environmental organization in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; radiofrequency engineer Mark Hutchins from Barrington, Mass.; Tony Blair, selectman in Great Barrington; and former New York Times journalist author B. Blake Levitt, who specializes in medical science writing.

Co-sponsors of the forum include The Nature Conservancy, Housatonic Valley Association, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, Sharon Audubon, Scenic Hudson, Lake Watch, Orion Afield, the E.F. Schumacher Society, and others.

Seating is limited. Pre-registration requested. Admission is $35 and includes lunch if registration is made by November 25. To register, call Judy Saerine at Education Connection, Route 63, Litchfield, at 860/435-2004.